Posts tagged with: Text Books

There have been many published articles lately about school curriculum, school performance, school choice, and the Obama dictates that are aimed at pumping more money and asserting more control of an already mediocre performing public school industry. In The Wall Street Journal, University of Dallas professor David Upham comments on a revised Texas school’s U.S. History curriculum that has been proposed and awaits approval. It’s caused a stir among the educrates but that’s partly due to a longtime feud between academic types and the parent types that are found on school boards when things are working as they were meant to.

Teaching kids is supposed to be a family responsibility. At the least, schools were meant to be locally run with advice from elected boards from the community. Sadly, some school boards in the past – too many I think – have become entrenched with careerists and political types with their eyes on higher office or sinister agendas. Don’t believe me? Look at the resumes of some of your county, and state officials in various positions.

Texas is a big, populous state and to put it crudely a major market for school books; and only a week or so before the WSJ article appeared, I saw another published piece in Education Week on text book content and publishing costs that suggested that innovative digital and online sources would allow greater flexibility in the fine tuning of content to a school district’s proclivity in telling a story – in the matter we are addressing here – the story of America. Many big city liberals don’t like having to take what a publisher gives them when the content reflects a pro-Constitution, pro-middle America mindset. And the reverse is also true.

What is emphasized at school sometimes works to the disadvantage of the truth. I went to school in the 1950s and 1960s and one thing I’ve noticed in my post graduate work as a functioning adult is that The Progressive Era didn’t get taught back then. Woodrow Wilson was characterized as the hero of the innocuous “14 points” – not the promoter of a one world righteously enlightened order. And that story about FDR’s advisers – that some of them had met with the USSR’s Stalin and were strong advocates of collectivized farming – didn’t appear in any text books I ever saw: not in grade school, not in high school, not in college.

When I watch ACTON’s film The Birth of Freedom – the part where Rodney Stark talks about being “taught the dark ages” – I nod in agreement. A lot of U.S. history and history in general has a thin outline as far as school texts are concerned. I was taught “the dark ages” too. Yet if they were so dark, how did the sea compass get invented; the plow, the axle, harnesses? Somebody must have turned on a light somewhere.

As historian John Lakacs writes in the ISI volume A Student’s Guide to the Study of History, history is where we “re-mind” ourselves of what happened in the past. Unfortunately, curriculum choices and wrong emphasis has created at least three generations in The United States that need to be “re-booted” after some significant software downloads. (In that we’re taking Lukacs more literally than he had figured.)

And it’s not just Texas that’s having curriculum battles. In South Carolina, a revised curriculum proposed by the academics was going to ignore American History before 1877 until parents started shouting NO when it occurred to them that 1877 is a convenient date to start only if you want to leave out the founding of the country and all the founding documents.

One of the downloads in this re-minding project all families need to consider is another UD professor Tom West’s book Vindicating The Founders, wherein he takes on the misrepresentations of our history that are often promoted in today’s classrooms. In his chapter “Women and the Family” West does a good job of addressing the oft lamented despair of today’s feminists concerning women’s rights during the Colonial period. West’s is an explanation that considers times long past and relies on the reader’s understanding of human nature and the context in which society functioned.

Then, the family was a unit of special and particular value for which there was an ideal example – Adam and Eve. A husband was a protector, a provider. A wife was the nurturing partner who bore and raised children and knew how to shoot when his absence required it. They had become “one flesh” in the sacrament of marriage and made decisions as a unit within God’s ideal. Voting and property and “rights” were bound to that ideal. It’s understandable for those times, but today….

May 9th is coming up fast. It’s Mother’s Day just in case you needed a re-mind-er. There’s a Father’s Day too. They are meant to be family celebrations, not phone calls to two different area codes or glances at photos of people you never got to know.